It been nearly 18 months since North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the three falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players "innocent" of raping and assaulting Crystal Gail Mangum. The prosecutor who brought the charges, Michael Nifong, was duly disbarred and the North Carolina State Bar declared emphatically that the charges were a lie.

Since no criminal charges were brought against, Mangum, the police (who falsified evidence and lied to grand juries), the "sexual assault" nurse at Duke University Medical Center who fabricated much of the story, and, of course, Nifong himself, all that has been left has been the many lawsuits against Durham, Duke, and Nifong. In other words, much of the case has been off the radar screen.

However, all of that has changed. Mangum has gone onto the speaking circuit, and now is claiming she was assaulted "with a broomstick" and that the original charges were true. She also is coming out with a book that will "tell all" and continue to repeat the lie.

This is not a singular effort on her part. It seems that the "man behind the curtain" is an attorney for the North Carolina NAACP, Al McSurely. It was McSurely who was hyping the charges very early and made it known to Nifong that he would not win the Democratic primary in May 2006 unless he brought charges before the election.

It also was McSurely who demanded -- and won -- a gag order against the defendants in the lacrosse case. (Nifong already had stopped making public statements.) And it was McSurely who posted an awful list of accusations on the North Carolina NAACP website. In fact, the NAACP left up the accusations for several months after Cooper's announcement that the accused players were "innocent."